This is a difficult book to review because Eric Mader is more intelligent than I am. He’s said somewhere that he narrowly missed having a career as a university academic. He now teaches English in Taipei, and you get the feeling that in publications such as Idiocy, Ltd. he’s compensating for the mundane nature of much of his work — forcing teens to “convert their Chinese syntax and thought patterns into passable English” — by allowing his intellectually playful mind to whirl at full throttle. The result is a wide range of experiences — some enjoyable, some incomprehensible. But perhaps the truth is that I am nearly as intelligent as Mader, just a lot less ingenious.
Mader recently became a Catholic, moving away from the US Midwest Protestantism of his forebears. Far be it for me to question the compatibility of high intelligence and the interconnected subtleties and incongruities of the Roman Catholic creed, if only because there are so many distinguished historical precedents. There are few references to this conversion here, only a glimpse of him reading Jesuit explicators of Thomas Aquinas on a plane, a reference to God having revealed himself in Scripture, and a ferocious diatribe against Richard Dawkins and the New Atheism (one of the best things in the book).
I had to check some of the assertions in this last piece, such as that there are various member circles that adherents of atheism can sign up for, culminating in breakfast or lunch with Dawkins for what Mader rightly calls a “staggering US$100,000 a year.” But he’s right in his details, it seems. Pope Francis, you think, would never descend to this.
The book consists of some 56 sections (you can’t call them chapters), some mere squibs, others longish dissertations on, to cite the most memorable of them, cats, red-neck Americans, and atheists. Mader says they’re two-thirds Kafka and one-third Monty Python. I sometimes found myself wishing they were entirely Monty Python, or perhaps entirely Kafka. As it is, this short book is certainly a roller-coaster ride of different sorts of reading experience.
Within these sections are hidden many little gems. There’s a set about animals, for instance, that contains the following: a rhino typically remains unimpressed, a lion’s swollen head is to hide its grossly oversized ego, an alligator is a moldy log with an attitude problem, earthworms refuse to tell us what they know, and bats burst from the hollowed trunks of long-dead trees like text messages sent from the cell phones of Hell.
But now the incomprehensibility issue. The shortest section was also, for me, the most incomprehensible. It reads, entire, as follows, and occupies a whole page:
Before the Recital/ A severed ear lying silently on the coffee table. “If you don’t know whose it is, don’t touch it!” my mother whispers.
I couldn’t make head or tail or this, and still can’t. Fortunately not much of the book is on this level of obscurity.
On the next level (thinking, perhaps, of Dawkins’s levels of membership) come sections that, while not obscure, seem somewhat pointless at best. Typical of these is one called Mr. Tsao and His Skull and concerns someone who takes his skull out for safe-keeping on a regular basis. I have to admit this was one of the instances where I thought to myself, and actually scribbled at the bottom of the page, “Why on earth do I have to read this?”
Generally I preferred the longer pieces, perhaps because Mader especially liked their topics and so extended them appropriately. And indeed on the whole I prefer Mader when he’s applying his mind to genuinely serious subjects, such as the existence or otherwise of a divinity. That’s why I liked his book Heretic Days [reviewed in Taipei Times Feb. 28, 2012] more than this new one. “Serious” topics do surface here from time to time, but mostly as un-ironic extrusions, sticking out from a largely ironic context.
Of the longer pieces in this book, Making the Grade in Naples, Florida stands out. It’s a dystopian piece on mindless American idiocy, and is also appropriately idiotic in its own narrative method. It’s s short-story of a kind, and features a man who gets arrested for being under-weight and reading European novels (“a felony since we pulled out of the UN during Jeb Bush’s first term”). Another prisoner is inside for being over-heard saying golf was a stupid game, and that he didn’t like barbecues.
Another piece, on writing a sonnet in grad school about McDonald’s, shows Mader’s literary and philosophical cast of mind, while the long item on cats, incorporating most of what has been said against them over the ages, is very entertaining. So too is another section called Why I Do Not Work for the CIA, and another that poses as a monologue by George W Bush and artfully and illuminatingly illustrates his mind-set. Mader is good on politics, and has written extensively on political affairs online. This book would have benefited from more on the subject.
Taiwan in particular features in a set of pieces entitled Taipei: City of Gentle Mayhem. The longest item here, called From Seth Descended, I found of varying interest and intelligibility. But the set is most marked for three pieces seemingly describing incidents in Mader’s daily life as a teacher that are all more or less straight narratives, without incongruities of any kind.
It’s worth pointing out that the author is interested in the work of the early-Soviet surrealist Daniil Kharms and the French prose-poet Max Jacob, and sees both as precursors of what he’s attempting here. But I’ve thought it fairer to treat Mader’s work as something written in its own right.
By and large, then, this book seems to me a light-hearted and relatively inconsequential digression from Eric Mader’s main concerns. What I’d really like to see from him are 200 pages on why he converted to Catholicism. Of course an old pagan like me would also like to read 300 pages from him on why he believes in Christianity in the first place. But that’s another matter.
Taiwan doesn’t have a lot of railways, but its network has plenty of history. The government-owned entity that last year became the Taiwan Railway Corp (TRC) has been operating trains since 1891. During the 1895-1945 period of Japanese rule, the colonial government made huge investments in rail infrastructure. The northern port city of Keelung was connected to Kaohsiung in the south. New lines appeared in Pingtung, Yilan and the Hualien-Taitung region. Railway enthusiasts exploring Taiwan will find plenty to amuse themselves. Taipei will soon gain its second rail-themed museum. Elsewhere there’s a number of endearing branch lines and rolling-stock collections, some
Could Taiwan’s democracy be at risk? There is a lot of apocalyptic commentary right now suggesting that this is the case, but it is always a conspiracy by the other guys — our side is firmly on the side of protecting democracy and always has been, unlike them! The situation is nowhere near that bleak — yet. The concern is that the power struggle between the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and their now effectively pan-blue allies the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) intensifies to the point where democratic functions start to break down. Both
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), and the country’s other political groups dare not offend religious groups, says Chen Lih-ming (陳立民), founder of the Taiwan Anti-Religion Alliance (台灣反宗教者聯盟). “It’s the same in other democracies, of course, but because political struggles in Taiwan are extraordinarily fierce, you’ll see candidates visiting several temples each day ahead of elections. That adds impetus to religion here,” says the retired college lecturer. In Japan’s most recent election, the Liberal Democratic Party lost many votes because of its ties to the Unification Church (“the Moonies”). Chen contrasts the progress made by anti-religion movements in
This was not supposed to be an election year. The local media is billing it as the “2025 great recall era” (2025大罷免時代) or the “2025 great recall wave” (2025大罷免潮), with many now just shortening it to “great recall.” As of this writing the number of campaigns that have submitted the requisite one percent of eligible voters signatures in legislative districts is 51 — 35 targeting Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus lawmakers and 16 targeting Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers. The pan-green side has more as they started earlier. Many recall campaigns are billing themselves as “Winter Bluebirds” after the “Bluebird Action”
RSS